The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

— Adrienne Rich

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

— Adrienne Rich

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees-theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

— Adrienne Rich

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand, the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure hi mover the charring log, nights, late, in the snowbound cabin did we dream or cry his face in the liquid embers, the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us? It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost, the comrade/twin whose palm would bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrow, forked-lightning of in satiate desire It was never the crude pestle, the blind ramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creature with natural resources equal to our own.

— Adrienne Rich

The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured untrained over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the world's body.

— Adrienne Rich

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals. You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge, on horseback, one hand touching his gun. You hardly know him, but you have to get to know him:he has access to machinery that could kill you. He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash, his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud from between his unsmiling lips. And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him, the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs, your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess to him, you are guilty of the crime of having been forced. And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten, his hand types out the detail sand he wants them all but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best. You hardly know him, but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down you worst moment on a machine and filed it in a file. He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows what you secretly wanted. He has access to machinery that could get you put away;and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, and if, in the sickening light of the precinct, your details sound like a portrait of your confessor, will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

— Adrienne Rich

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

— Adrienne Rich

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

— Adrienne Rich

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

— Adrienne Rich

The Stranger Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the hereof the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt watching the lights turn on in the towers walking as I’ve walked beforelike a man, like a woman, in the city my visionary anger cleansing my sight and the detailed perceptions of mercy flowering from that anger if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light and hear them talking a dead language if they ask me my identity what can I say but am the androgyny am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

— Adrienne Rich